A Black Mile To The Surface

by Chris Bissette

in Issue 161, June 2025

The potion the witch forced on him was taking effect already. Gillan’s lips were tingling, the skin of his face drawing tight over his skull. He felt focused, readied, like a drawn bowstring in the moment before release. He had forgotten how to blink.

Twenty minutes, she said. Give it twenty minutes to seep into his blood, then go. In the dark of the tunnels he had no way to gauge time. It didn’t feel like twenty minutes had passed but his muscles were twitching, pulsing with purpose, with the need to act. Twenty minutes or not, it was time.

He burped and it tasted sour, the tang of too-tart apples and something else he couldn’t place.

Time to get to work.

The first few minutes in the tunnels he felt naked. He left his pack and hammer back at the entrance just as instructed, chugged the weird concoction and set off into the dark. At first his hands felt useless, empty, like they didn’t know what to do without the knurled metal of the hammer’s shaft against his palms, but the tunnels soon narrows and he realised that the pack would have got stuck, that there would be no room to swing the hammer if he needed to. The witch had been right. But still his hands flexed and gripped at nothing, filled with habit and nervous energy.

The brew ended that nervous twitching. Now he was fully in its thrall, a creature of cold stillness and coiled purpose. He slipped from inky shadow to inky shadow, heightened senses soaking up dim light from phosphorescent rocks in the cavern walls. He felt fully at one with this precise, singular moment.

The path forked. Gillan didn’t hesitate. To the left the faint light trails were blurred slightly. Something was smeared across the rocks, a sign something had passed this way. The right held no such visions, so he turned left.

The tunnels plunged deep into the guts of the mountain and he followed, a clot in the twisting arteries of this ancient place. Somewhere ahead lay the temple, the cult, the black stone he was to recover. When he reached it he would do what he had to do. He was unstoppable, inevitable, a one man-….

A shift underfoot, a panel depressing. Click from above. A rumble felt rather than heard. A moment of clarity.

“Shit.”

There was nowhere to go and no time to go there, and so as the roof fell he braced for impact. He tucked his head into his chest, tensed his back, the thick muscles across his shoulder blades like a shelf for the falling rock. Flattened his hands against the roof, pushed back in defiance of gravity. In the split second before it hit he sucked in air, spread his feet, screwed his heels into the ground.

The weight was crushing. He sank, knees bending, every tendon tight and ready to burst. The air in his chest screamed for release. But he held on, clamped his lips tight, braced like he was birthing the biggest shit of his life. If he let that breath go he was dead.

He pictured a crack in the earth running between his legs. He pressed out with his knees, channelled all that weight down his legs and through his feet and out into the ground, imagined tearing the world in two with his body. His muscles bulged, his calves and thighs and arse threatening to pop straight off the bone.

Fuck you, he thought, and he pressed. He strained in his core, forced that held-in breath against the inside of his lips, dug deep for something. Anything. Nothing moved.

And still he pressed.

His lungs screamed, filled now not with air but with fire, fire begging to be free. But if he left his lungs empty, let that tension in his core relax for even a moment he’d be crushed.

He pressed. And slowly the small of his back began to rise, legs following, and where his back went his shoulders followed. Stars clouded his vision, the vein in his forehead began to bulge and throb, and still he pressed. Still he rose, and with him the stone rose, too. His legs straightened, inch by screaming inch, and still he clamped down on that life saving breath, pressing with every shred of desperate strength he possessed.

From deep within the rock above there came a hollow clunk, and that was that. The rock settled back into place, the mechanism reset in a moment of sublime anticlimax.

Gillan let the breath escape his body, and then the stars and the darkness took him.

He hated magic, in general. It wasn’t natural. You knew where you stood with flesh and bone. People you can generally get the measure of just by looking, see their size and their strength, the way they move and carry themselves. Sometimes you’re surprised, sure, but even when it’s the kind of surprise that hurts it feels fair.

Magic, though? As far as Gillan was concerned magic was cheating. He didn’t trust it, didn’t like the tattoos or the gem-studded nails holding sorceries and glamours, the scars on the flesh that didn’t come from honest battle but instead from fucking around with blood and demons and things best left untouched. He’d once gone to bed with a man who had a spell hidden inside one of his teeth, a spell that erupted out of his nose and eyes with tendrils of thick black smoke that tried to choke Gillan while he slept. How’s a man supposed to see that coming? How do you fight that?

He hated magic, and he hated those who practiced it, and that meant that he hated witches on principle. But he couldn’t deny that they were useful.

“You’re a big lad.” Her first words as he ducked under the low jamb of her door. Her house wasn’t at all what he’d pictured, a tidy little terrace on a cobbled side street in the middle of town, a stone’s throw from the market and the church. The mountain towered over the rooftops, peak white with snow despite the summer heat, guts filled with horrors he couldn’t wait to meet.

“Come in,” she said. “Sit down.” She pulled out a chair for him, smiled when he frowned at it. “You’re big but you’re not that big, boy. It’ll hold.”

He sat, wincing as the chair groaned under his weight but relaxing when it held.

“Not what you expected?” She smiled, and he nodded. “I get that a lot. Some of my… colleagues”—she grimaced at the word, picked it from her mouth like hair her teeth—”still cling to the old ways. Shitty little hovels, incense and smoke, fingernails you could whittle with.” She smiled, and his eyes glanced down to her perfectly manicured hands, ovular nails with crisp white tips. The nails of both little fingers were studded with tiny red rubies, and when he looked back up he spotted another mounted on one of her canines. “I’m a bit more modern,” she finished.

“They said you could help,” Gillan said, finding his voice. The witch laughed.

“They!” she said. “The ubiquitous They. Who exactly said I could help, and with what?”

“I’m looking for the cult,” Gillan said. “Under the mountain. They took something and I’m here to get it back. I was told to see you first.”

A shadow passed over her face and she turned to stare at the wall, like she could see through it to the mountain beyond. Maybe she can, Gillan thought.

She was quiet a long time. He could almost see the gears turning in her head. A muscle in her jaw twitched almost imperceptibly as she ground her back teeth together. Gillan swallowed, memory linking the ruby on her teeth to the lover he’d lost to the shadows.

She turned back to him, met his eyes with hers. He was sure they’d been green when he sat down, but he saw now they were a blue so pale they were almost grey. Eyes like the threat of snow, he thought.

“That’s a grim place to be headed,” she said. She looked him up and down. “Big lad. Those tunnels won’t be friendly to you.”

“I won’t be friendly to them,” he said, and again she laughed.

“Okay, pal, whatever you say.” Her nails tapped on the table as she thought, still not breaking eye contact.

“You know what’s in there?” she asked. He shook his head.

“The thing they worship. It’s not just an idea, you understand? It’s alive, flesh and blood and… other things. Things we don’t have words for. It’s in the rocks and the earth. If they took something it’s because It wanted it, and the second you step foot under the stone it’ll know you’re there. And why.” She paused. “It’ll set the earth itself against you.”

He could tell she wanted a response, a sign that he understood, but he gave her nothing. He held her eyes with his, his face a blank mask. That muscle in her jaw twitched again. She was the first to look away.

“Big and stubborn,” she said, and she sighed. “They really do have a type for jobs like this, don’t they?”

She slapped her palm on the table and he jumped in surprise. The chair creaked ominously beneath him. She smiled, stood and turned to the cupboards on the wall behind her.

I can help,” she said, “though I don’t know how much.” She was taking jars down, scooping powders and herbs into a mortar and grinding them down.

“I don’t want that,” he said, gesturing to whatever she was mixing up. “What can you tell….”

She silenced him with a raised eyebrow and a turn of her shoulder, dismissing his protests without a word. The grind and scrape of the pestle was suddenly loud in the small room.

“You came for my help and you’ll take what I offer,” she said. He couldn’t see her face now, but he could hear how the smile had dropped off her lips. “Be glad I take nothing in return.”

It was only later that he wondered if she’d worked some subtle magic to stop him arguing. His mind was full of objections, with demands for information instead of brews and magic, but he voiced none of them. He just sat in silence while she mixed up that potion, explained that it would take twenty minutes to work.

She told him where the entrance was, bid him leave his gear at the cave mouth. “You’ll be coming out the same way you went in anyway,” she said. “Assuming you come out.”

Then she bundled him out the door, bottle in hand and a kiss lingering on his cheek.

“Best of luck, big man,” she said. “I’ll want that bottle back.”

Consciousness returned through a grey haze. He didn’t know how long he had been out, lying face down on the ground beneath a half ton of stone that could have dropped and crushed him with no warning. His brain said he’d only been out for a few seconds—he could still feel the witch’s brew coursing through his veins—but there was no way to be sure.

Gingerly he pulled himself to his feet. He leaned his back against the rough rock wall, waited for his eyes to once more adjust to the darkness. Without the dim phosphorescence of the stones to guide him he’d be blind, and now he knew that the tunnel was trapped he couldn’t afford to plunge on recklessly.

“It’ll turn the earth itself against you,” he said, and laughed. Just traps, stone and mechanisms and pressure plates. Not magic at all. They’d still kill him, of course, but this he could anticipate. This he could counter.

Slowly the light returned, and he pressed on.

The tunnels plunged deeper into the mountain, the temperature rising every step of the way until sweat was pouring out of him. But in one way he was glad of that. As the temperature rose the tunnels narrowed, so that he had to stop and strip off his armour, turning sideways and sucking in his stomach to squeeze around a narrow corner in the path. Without the sweat to lubricate him he would have shredded himself on the rocks. As it was, he only bled a little.

He debated leaving his armour behind as he had left his hammer and his pack, reasoning that he’d be coming back this way anyway, but he decided against it. The passage might still widen, and if he found himself in a situation where he needed the protection and didn’t have it he might not live to make the return journey. So he dragged it along behind him, wincing at every scrape and snag, glad it was thick leather and hide rather than the cumbersome metal some warriors had taken to casing themselves in. Every now and then he snorted to himself, wondering what a sight he must make. Naked and sweating, boots on but cock out, a leather strap around his waist holding only a bag of chalk, a set of picks, and the bottle the witch had bade him return.

The going was slow, and he worried that the potion would wear off before he had a chance to get the benefits of its effect—though really, he thought, hadn’t it already saved his life once, back at the falling stone? It wasn’t just the narrow, winding path that slowed him, though. The knowledge that the tunnel was trapped changed everything.

Every step, every inch gained, was at the expense of minutes spent testing the surface of the ground, feeling the walls, prying at the roof with his fingertips to look for seams or hinges or panels or wires or… A multitude of possibilities. A thousand ways to die.

Traps meant people, meant intelligence, meant somebody expecting ingress and wanting to repel it. But it also meant residents who needed their own ways in and out, who needed a way to bypass their own defences in a hurry. So while he hunted for new and interesting ways to die, he also hunted for another way in.

His entire world focused down to that tunnel and that search, to the way the stone scraped under his nails and bit his flesh. The passage narrowed further. He couldn’t turn now, was sandwiched between the two rock faces and under constant pressure from both sides. When he first felt it beginning to close in he retreated, briefly, used one of the straps of his leathers to tie his armour around his ankle so he didn’t need his hands to drag it.

How much distance had he covered? There was no way to know, just like there was no way to know how long it took. The heat continued to grow, and now he could feel a breeze pushing at him from further up the tunnel—though breeze didn’t seem the right word, breeze to him implied cooling and refreshment, this was a slow hot wind that brought the smell of sulfur and a hot, chymical tang he couldn’t place. He realised that the phosphorescence in the rocks had faded. He pressed on in perfect darkness.

Soon he had sweated all he could sweat. His chest and back were burning, ragged tears where the rocks had dragged and grazed at his now too-dry flesh. Blood, it turned out, didn’t make as good a lubricant as sweat. Too sticky. And the potion was fading, too, that singular clarity he’d felt earlier receding and leaving behind a growing ache at the base of his skull, one that he could tell would swell and engulf his head. It would settle into the depths of his brain, set up camp behind his eyes where it would dance purple and black and make him beg for death as a release from the pain. He didn’t know how he knew, just that he did, in the same way that he knew that the sudden urge to grind his teeth was also a remnant of the witch’s work.

Her bottle made a dull clunk against the rock and he cursed her name, spat it from a mouth as dry as old bones.

Light flickered up ahead, gone as quickly as it came, and he froze. His grasping hands had found no exit, no other way around this tunnel—and that also meant no escape. If somebody came down here now he was surely dead. He’d be skewered where he stood with no hope of mounting a defence.

He waited, barely breathing. He could hear nothing over the thump of his own heart—and with every beat, that ache in his skull intensified just a fraction. 

No more light came. No more sound reached him.

He moved. Even slower now, dragging his body over the rocks as quietly as possible, every breath let out in a trickle that took long seconds to empty his lungs. He begged his thumping heart to be still, be silent, don’t give me away if you want to beat another day.

His fingers scuttled over rock, and then found nothing but air. A corner. An opening in the passage. Ahead was thick inky shadow, with no visible sign that the tunnel had come to an end.

Again he waited, listening with held breath. His skull throbbed. No light came.

Gillan’s fingers found the corner, gripped the jagged edge of the rock, pulled. Pain flared as his back tore open against the wall, as his knee struck a perfectly placed outcrop of rock. Too hasty. Too impatient. But he didn’t care, now there was an exit he wanted only to be free of the crushing sweltering grasping pressing passage he had forced his way through, had endured for so long.

He burst from the tunnel, stumbled to the floor, rolled arse over tit, and that was what saved his life.

He heard two things: the heavy clang of metal hitting the ground behind him, and the sharp snap of a flatbow. He felt rather than heard the bolt rip through the air where he’d been before he tripped. Then hell broke loose.

The rising tide of pain in his head turned to a crashing wave as light filled the air. He rolled onto his back and screamed as his eyes opened and he found himself staring directly at the source of it—a fist-sized rock floating in the air, weird purple-tinged light pouring off it in waves. Someone somewhere was working magic.

Someone was running at him. With no time to get to his feet he kicked out, whipping the armour tied to his ankle into the legs of his attacker who went sprawling across the floor. A knife bounced across the rocks, but Gillan was nowhere near it.

He scrambled, turned onto his injured knee and pushed himself up. He winced at the pain. Something hard slammed into his shoulder and he threw an elbow backwards, felt it make solid contact, heard a grunt and a thud, dived to the side before whoever was behind him could hit him again.

Ambushed, naked and unarmed, with no time to get a read on the situation, he ran. The armour strapped to his ankle scraped and dragged, bounced around his feet, did its best to trip him, but he stumbled on regardless. Another flatbow snapped behind him and he resisted the urge to duck. Either the bolt would hit him or it wouldn’t.

The weird light pulsed and twisted and the pain in his head writhed with it.

He saw an opening in the rock wall ahead of him and dived down into a passage, this one wide and smooth and clearly worked by mortal hands. He reached a junction and ducked left, watched another flatbow bolt clatter against the rock, threw himself flat against the wall beyond the corner and waited.

They’d expect him to keep running, and he wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. Booted feet slapped the floor of the passage he’d just run down and his tattered, bloody fingers dug into the bag of chalk at his waist. His palms stung as the chalk found every open wound on his hands but that was fine, that was good, that was what it was for. Bloody hands would slide and slip. Chalked hands could grip and rip and tear.

A head came around the corner and he drove into the opposite wall, smearing the rock with a paste of blood and bits of bone. As the body fell Gillan twisted the knife out of its hands, turned to bury it in the cheek of the next one around the corner. He drove his knee into the nearest soft bit, jammed his thumb deep into an eye, yanked down on the lower jaw with all his monstrous strength.

Now he had two knives, and two fewer enemies.

For a second he thought about waiting for more to come—or, better, heading back round the corner and taking the fight to them. But he was smarter than that. He’d bet there were flatbows trained on the end of that passage, plus whatever demon fucker was making the light waiting for him with some incantation or another. He was still naked and tied to his armour.

So, while he still could, he ran. Again.

From squeezing to running to crawling.

He found himself in a maze of corridors, all identical and all without any apparent purpose. No decoration, no doors, nothing to give any indication as to where he was or where he was going.

Which, he supposed, was the purpose. What better way to keep someone away from your weird living god buried under a mountain than get them hopelessly lost on the way in?

Once he was sure he wasn’t being pursued he allowed a few minutes to rest and get dressed. His head was screaming now, it felt like his skull had been cracked in two, and now that the furious bliss of battle had worn off he was acutely aware of the injuries he was carrying. But he had no choice, he had to press on.

And so he found himself crawling. Once he realised he was in a maze he’d turned his mind to solving it, using the chalk to mark corners and paths so he wouldn’t keep retreading the same route. Every now and then he caught a whiff of that same smell that had surrounded him in the passageway, and he followed it.

It was thinking about that passage that gave him the way out. The maze seemed endless, and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get his bearings. He found himself almost wistfully longing for that hard slog up the tunnel, slowly hunting for traps or another way around but at least knowing that he couldn’t get lost, could always find his way back.

And that was what did it. Another way around. Absolutely no way were the cultists hiding inside this mountain—he’d started to think of them as ants in a nest— navigating this maze any time they wanted to leave. Assuming, of course, that they did leave. They had to eat, right?

There had to be another way. So he stopped searching for an exit and started searching for a back door, and it didn’t take long to find one.

The tunnels he found himself in would have felt small and cramped if he didn’t have the visceral memory of the squeezing, crushing passageway to look back on. They were square, barely two feet to each side, made of hot metal buried in the rock in the roof of the maze. They were filled with a roiling yellow mist that carried that same stink of sulphur and something else, and he realised quickly that they weren’t a shortcut at all but were instead some kind of ventilation system carrying that yellow stuff away from whatever was in the centre of the mountain.

He crawled against the current of the mist. It was hot, almost steam, and the stink clogged up his nose and made his eyes water. He wished he had something to cover his mouth and nose with but, fool that he was, he’d left everything useful back with his pack.

The tunnel was long and straight, cutting a beeline toward what he hoped was his final destination. He crawled quickly, knees and boots clanging loudly against the metal, bottle swinging against the walls. He no longer cared for stealth. Somebody knew he was here, was probably hunting him through the maze right now, and he could either go slow and quiet and hope not to be found or he could put distance between him and them.

Ahead, a grate. He felt something brush the edges of his conscious mind, some alien intelligence. He heard a whisper of a voice. Pain flared in his head, his vision exploding with light as his skull throbbed, and for a second he was rendered completely incapable of motion or speech. He just knelt there in the tunnel, head in his hands, begging for it to end.

As quickly as it flared it subsided, the pain settling back into that dull lump in the base of his skull. The voice he had heard was gone. Nothing probed at the edge of his mind.

His vision swam with floating lights and he shook his head to try and disperse them, then pushed the grate open. It only fell an inch or two, falling flat on the floor with a loud clang that made the pain flare again. He waited, not wanting a repeat of what had happened at the end of that awful passageway, but nobody moved. Nobody came.

He pulled himself out and took stock of his surroundings. The six sides of the room held guttering torches that cast deep, flickering shadows over row after row of bones and skulls, stacked and piled high in cubbyholes that filled nearly every vertical surface. Only one wall was clear of them and that held the doors, giant and black and carved with runes and glyphs that pulsed and shimmered with purple light.

The stink in here was awful. Thick black pipes that looked almost organic draped down from the ceiling and that yellow mist was oozing out of their joints, falling heavy to the ground where it coiled and swirled at knee height, pulled slowly into grates identical to the one he’d just crawled out of. He followed the curve of the wet pipework with his eyes, tracing them to where they ended.

There was a pool in the middle of the floor and something was lying in it, a twisted oil-slick entity that looked like the rotten fetus he’d seen a midwife pull from the belly of a woman struck down by a necrotising plague. Only it was bigger, more angular, wronger. It had a three-hinged jaw clamped over the end of one of those pipes, a big fat throat that wobbled up and down as it sucked down whatever that yellow shit was they were pumping in for it. And around its neck, on a chain as thick as Gillan’s forearm, a black stone the size of his fist.

As soon as he saw it he heard the voice, this time louder, more present, more violent. It shrieked and screamed in his head and again the pain and the lights flared up, driving him to his knees. Through the haze of agony he was aware of a rumble in the ground, of the flames on the torches dimming slightly before bursting up even brighter than before. Something moved beside him.

It will turn the ground itself against you, the witch had said, words that somehow rang as loud in his head as the tri-tonal screech of the thing. He pushed the veil of pain aside, rolled away as an enormous fist of rock made a vacuum in the space where he had just been standing. One of his hands found one of the cultist’s knives. The other dived into the bag of chalk.

The rock creature finished pulling itself out of the ground, which rippled and bubbled like a tar pit as more earth flowed in to fill the void the monster had created. Gillan’s head was hammering, he felt like someone was pressing down on him with huge pressure, like they were drilling into the very crown of his skull. He wanted to pull his own head off to escape the pain, could feel bile and vomit rising in his throat in some sort of flailing defense mechanism mounted by his shocked body, but he swallowed it down. The pain was awful, almost unbearable, but somehow it was keeping the grasping voice-tendrils of that thing at bay.

The rock creature took a shuddering step towards him, twelve feet of solid stone, and one of those enormous boulder fists swung at him again. He dived, rolled, hacked at it with the knife and saw sparks. Gillan twisted away, put one of the torches between it and him, and he unleashed a fist full of chalk.

The powder spread out in the air, made contact with the torch, and it erupted into flame. The rock creature stumbled back clumsily and out of sheer instinct Gillan leapt at it, wrapped a bicep around its shoulders and twisted onto its back as the yellow mist settling on the floor rippled and burned. Fire pumped up the pipes, through the grates, turned the room into a furnace of blistering heat.

The god thing in the pool shrieked and snarled as whatever sustenance it had been choking down from the pipe turned to fire in its mouth. He felt it try to grip his mind but fail, felt a twist in the air as the magic that animated this pile of rocks died, and as the stone monster slowly tilted forward Gillan sprang from its back.

He landed on the creature in the pool and he landed blade down. The cultist’s knife sank through gristle and bone and meat and that three-hinged jaw snapped and snarled in Gillan’s face but it was no good. He twisted the knife, not caring that the fires that were searing the creature from the inside were also scorching his arms and his face, melting his leather and grafting it onto his skin. That was a problem for the future.

“Fuck you,” he said, and as pain rolled over his skull and bile reared up his throat again he spat a dangling trail of stomach acid into the thing’s face. Then he stood, and waited. Outside the room he could hear alarm bells ringing. Soon, he was sure, he’d hear the clatter of feet, the scrape and jangle and snap of a thousand armed cultists come to avenge their god. But he’d be gone before they got here, back into the vents where they hadn’t thought to look for him before and wouldn’t think to look for him now.

He stood over the dying godling, feeling it screech and shriek inside his head, but its voice was drowned out by the roar of pain that had been growing ever since the witch’s brew had worn off. Or maybe this was the real effect of the potion, the true purpose, a means to shield him against the psychic assault of this twisted entity.

He stuffed the black stone unceremoniously into his bag of chalk, turned away from the crawling mess in its bath-cum-grave, and crawled back into the tunnels. Back to everything he still had to do. A black mile to the surface, through the tunnel and the maze and that accursed passageway. But it hadn’t broken him on the way in, and it wouldn’t break him on the way out.

Time to return that bottle.

 © June 2025, Chis Bissette

Chis Bissette an award-winning writer of tabletop roleplaying games and one of the co-lead designers of the new edition of Tunnels & Trolls This is their first appearance in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.